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And so it is. Where individual initiative to provide a service for the public good, whether for his country or community, can simply be overrun by the federal government's natural inclination to expand, the ability for Americans to serve others without government interference will diminish precipitously. Whether intentional or not (and we suspect it is intentional), instituting policies so that intermediating institutions that feed the hungry, thwart human trafficking, care for the homeless, break the cycles of addiction, research cures for disease, minister to prisoners, and build homes to restore lives are systematically weakened undermines civil society in ways that are incompatible with our country's survival.

If churches and charities do not stand in that gap, the governmental bureaucracies will, however inadequately, fill it, thus reducing citizens in need to clients who fill political objectives.

In 1996, welfare reform was an enormous achievement, not so much for the billions of dollars it saved but for the lives it renewed. The cultural shift from dependency to responsibility restored a social contract that had been absent since the Great Society, in which more than a trillion dollars of wealth was confiscated from the productive and given to the unproductive, with devastating consequences. The lingering cost of that failed experiment is still being paid by people living in zones of hopelessness where fathers were replaced by the state.

De Tocqueville again: "As soon as common affairs are treated in common, each man notices that he is not as independent of his fellows as he used to suppose and that to get their help he must often offer his aid to them."

That is, if a citizen is to expect help from his fellow American, he has an implied obligation to offer help in return, creating a social capital to which all Americans can contribute and, when necessary, draw. Understood was a reciprocating binding social contract of accountability. Citizens had an obligation to help, but recipients also had an obligation to return to the productive side of the social capital ledger. Only then could these intermediating institutions be sustained.

If we should reach the precipice of such a condition where churches and charities succumb to encroaching federal power, we should finally learn the meaning of de Tocqueville's warning. "It is in vain to summon a people who have been rendered so dependent on the central power to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity."

Goodbye churches and charities, welcome bureaucratic and politician domination. That is the wrong direction, and it should be defeated.

Newt Gingrich is a former speaker of the House of Representatives. Rick Tyler serves as Gingrich's spokesperson and is the founding director of Renewing American Leadership.

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Christianity Today recently interviewed Gingrich about the Republican Party and his conversion to Catholicism.

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April (Web-only) 2009, Vol. 53